http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/what-motivates-extreme-athletes.html

On the contrary, Brymer said his work has suggested that many
extreme athletes are the opposite of impulsive; not only are they careful and
thoughtful planners, but they actually avoid thrill-seekers “like the plague,”
he said.

But when he conducted research specifically on experienced extreme-sports
enthusiasts, he found little evidence that participants are reckless, or have
some kind of Freudian death wish. Instead, Brymer has found that “older” extreme
athletes — as in, those who are past their mid-20s — exercise deep care in equal
proportion to the high risk involved. “A lot of these people are highly
intelligent people, methodological and systematical,” Brymer said. Those he’s
interviewed don’t take one spontaneous trip to REI and then sail off a cliff;
rather, they spend years studying the environment and the mechanics of, for
example, parachutes, before taking any action, “in order to make it as safe as
it possibly can be.”

If the approach is more thoughtful for these athletes than the rest of us might
suspect, so are the motivations that drive them to extreme sports in the first
place. They’re not just seeking an adrenaline rush, he said: rather, what keeps
many of them coming back is something akin to the flow-like state achieved
through mindful meditation, one in which “you’re so in the moment that
everything else drops away,” Brymer said. “You’re focused on the here and now.”